At the “Vic.” you could rub shoulders with costers and longshoremen, noisy, rowdy, and prone to fight on the slightest provocation, while the entertainment was more than coarse enough, but quite free from the subtle poison of a crim.-con. trial presided over by Baron Nicholson. With this saving, however, I am bound to admit that the old “Vic.” was not a place which could have been looked on without serious misgivings by any one in the remotest degree responsible for peace or decency in South London. The influence which it exercised, to put it mildly, though undoubtedly powerful, could by no possibility have had any elevating effect on the intellect or morals of any human being; but for all that, it was always a favourite place of resort, and had a strong hold on the dense population who earn a scanty and precarious living in the New Cut and the Old Kent Road. How it was that the lease of the old “Vic.,” with seventeen years still to run, came into the market some eight years back, I am not aware; but so it happened, and it was purchased by a financial Company, who, with the best intentions, embarked on the risky experiment of running the “Royal Victoria Hall,” as it was now called, as a coffee-tavern and place of entertainment, against the neighbouring music-halls in which drink was sold. In eight months the Company lost £2800, and the Victoria was closed, with every chance of drifting back, on the next change of ownership, into the old ruts. Happily for South London, a better fate was in store for the “Vic.,” for there were those who had eyes to see its value if properly handled, not, indeed, as a commercial speculation, but as a power for lifting the social life of the neighbourhood on to a higher level. A committee was formed, with the late Mr. Samuel Morley as chairman, and Miss Cons as honorary secretary and manager, a guarantee fund was raised, and the Hall reopened. It has been a hard fight; but with a chairman whose speech in the darkest hour rang, “We don’t mean to let this thing fall to the ground,” and a lady of unsurpassed experience and devotion amongst the poor, whose whole life was from the first freely and loyally given to the work, the field has been won. I say deliberately “won,” and if any one doubts my word, let him walk over Waterloo Bridge any evening (for the “Vic.” is always open), and look at this thing fairly; let him go into the coffee-tavern, the theatre, the big billiard and smoking-rooms, the reading and class-rooms at the top, and the gymnasium in the basement, and keep his ears and eyes wide open all the time,--and then go home and thank God that such work is going on in the very quarter of our huge city in which the need is sorest. I say, let him go any evening, but for choice I would advise a Tuesday, for on Tuesdays the “Penny Science Lectures” are given, which are, of course, less popular than the variety entertainments and the ballad concerts which occur whenever the funds